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Resume: Paul Ashton

Paul Ashton (BA [Hons] Dip Ed PhD Mcq PHANSW), Director of Public History Australia, was Professor of Public History and Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) until 2015. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the ACPH and co-editor of the journal Public History Review and Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra and the Department of History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University.

Before joining UTS in 1995, Paul was a consulting historian for twelve years. He has worked in a broad range of areas including heritage, community history, oral history, commissioned history and exhibitions. Paul is a past President of the Professional Historians Association NSW Inc, a founding member of the Australian Council of Professional Historians Associations, a past Board Member of the National Council of Public History in the USA, Chair of the Board of the digital Dictionary of Sydney and a Board Member of the Australian Milling Museum (Bathurst).

Paul has worked with community groups, local, state and federal government agencies and not-for-profit and corporate organisations. He is a member of the NSW Heritage Council’s Heritage Advisory Committee and has on numerous occasions been a judge on the NSW Premier’s History Awards.

Photograph courtesy Joanne Saad

Select Works

Recent reports

Paul Ashton, ‘Peer Review of the Preliminary National Heritage List Assessment: “Sydney: Convict Colony to Civic Nation”‘, prepared for the Federal Department of Environment, June 2014.

Jennifer Cornwall and Paul Ashton, Sustaining a Nation: A History of Agriculture in Australia Since Federation, Focus Publications, Canberra, 2000.

Patricia Hale and Paul Ashton, Sustaining a Nation: A History of the commonwealth Departments of agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 1901-2001, Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries – Australia, Canberra, 2002.

Paul Ashton, ‘Duncan Waterson: Public Historian’, in From the Frontier: Essays in honour of D.B. Waterson, special issue of Australian Cultural History, vol 20, 2001, pp 17-24.

Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton, ‘Out of Place: On not belonging’, Public History Review, vol 10, 2000, pp 37-42.

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘At Home with the Past: Background and Initial findings from the National Survey’, Australian Cultural History, no 22, 2003, pp5-30.

Paul Ashton and Jennifer Cornwall, ‘Corralling Conflict: The Politics of Australian Heritage Legislation Since the 1970s’, in Alexander Trapeznik (ed), Conflicted Heritage, special issue of Public History Review, vol 13, 2006, pp53-65.

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘Facing Facts?: History wars in Australian high schools’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol 91, 2007, pp45-57.

Paul Ashton and Shirley Fitzgerald, ‘Public History in Australia’, Public History News, (National Council on Public History in cooperation with the Department of History, Indiana University at Indianapolis), vol 14, no 3, Spring ,1994, pp1; 8.

Paul Ashton, ‘The Handicapped: outside community margins’, in Patrick O’Farrell and Louella McCarthy (eds), Community in Australia, Community History Program, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, pp37-40.

Paul Ashton, ‘The Past in the Present: Public history and the City of Sydney’, in Tim Murray (ed), Exploring the Modern City: Recent Approaches to Urban History and Archaeology, HHT, Sydney 2004, pp1-24.

Paul Ashton, ‘”An Architectural Monstrosity”?: The Cahill Expressway and Town Planning’, in Martin Grotty and David Andrew Roberts (eds), The Great Mistakes of Australian History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006, pp93-107.

Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton, ‘Introduction: People and their pasts and public history today’, in Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (eds), People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009, pp1-20.

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘Connecting with History: Australians and their pasts’, in Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (eds), People and Their Pasts: Public History Today, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009, pp23-41.

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘”Unfinished Business”: Public History in a Post-Colonial Nation’, in Daniel Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer (eds), Contested Histories in Public Space, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009, pp71-98.

Paul Ashton and Meg Foster, ‘Public Histories’, in Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (eds), New Directions in Social and Cultural History, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2017, pp151-170.

Paul Ashton, Kresno Brahmantyo and Jaya Keaney, ‘Public History in Indonesia: The Old Disorder?’, in Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik (eds), What is Public History Globally?, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2019, pp93-106.